This is Ron Stock from the Global Escalation Services team and I recently worked with a customer to determine which misbehaving driver was crashing their critical server. This particular crash was a STOP 0x00000020 which maps to KERNEL_APC_PENDING_DURING_EXIT ...read more

Recently I came across an instance where my debugger did not do what I wanted. Rarely do computers disobey me, but this one was unusually stubborn. There was no other option; I had to bend the debugger to my will. There are many ways ...read more

The Microsoft Virtual Academy training portal offers quick and easy access to presentations, webcasts, whitepapers and other technical content about Microsoft’s Cloud technologies. It is public, free and you learn at your own pace while earning awards and recognitions, and connecting with over 1 million other IT Pros.

The Microsoft Virtual Academy training portal offers quick and easy access to presentations, webcasts, whitepapers and other technical content about Microsoft’s Cloud technologies. It is public, free and you learn at your own pace while earning awards and recognitions, and connecting with over 1 million other IT Pros.

This eight-hour course delivered by Symon Perriman (Microsoft Technical Evangelist) and Jeff Woolsey (Microsoft Program Manager) is designed for IT Pros in need of learning how to leverage Hyper-V to perform essential tasks in the Windows Server 2012 platform. It’s a team-teaching demo-rich, learning experience.

Introduction to Hyper-V agenda includes:

Introduction to Microsoft Virtualization

Hyper-V Infrastructure

Hyper-V Networking

Hyper-V Storage

Hyper-V Management

Hyper-V High Availability and Live Migration

Integration with System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager

Integration with Other System Center 2012 Components

This training is available now for free and can be downloaded for viewing at a later time, if desired.

I often get asked the question by customers on how to find the newly released hotfixes for Cluster and Hyper-V or the customer wants to know what hotfixes are out there. We have 3 Wiki pages that will make life easier for you when looking for hotfixes for Windows Server 2008 R2 Cluster and Hyper-V. You can also setup an RSS Subscription to the Wiki page so you can the updated Wiki page in your favorite RSS app or Outlook.

Hello again! Kim Nichols here again. For this post, I'm taking a break from the AD LDS discussions (hold your applause until the end) and going back to a topic near and dear to my heart - Group Policy loopback processing.
Loopback processing is not ...read more

Hello everyone! Aamer here from the Windows Performance team at Microsoft. Recently, I’ve noticed an increase in customer calls regarding the amount of RAM that Windows reports. This blog will discuss the reasons why Windows may report the incorrect amount of installed RAM.

First off, you should confirm that your OS supports more than 4 GB of RAM by checking to the following MSDN page:

If your OS appears in this list, yet your OS reports the incorrect amount of RAM, then the following options should be reviewed:

1. Disable the redundant memory feature in the BIOS

NOTE If you add more memory to the system, it is possible that the BIOS will recognize the full amount of physical RAM that is installed in the machine, but Windows will recognize only a part of the RAM. If the machine has a redundant memory feature or a memory mirroring feature that is enabled, the full complement of memory may not be visible to Windows. Redundant memory provides the system with a failover memory bank when a memory bank fails. Memory mirroring splits the memory banks into a mirrored set. Both features are enabled or disabled in the BIOS and cannot be accessed through Windows.

2. The maximum amount of physical memory available to the OS and applications is also determined by the following:

a. The number and types of PCI devices installed in the system b. Support for PCI Hot Plug capability (PCI Hot Plug reserves additional memory to facilitate swapping of devices without bringing the entire system down) c. Processor support and chipset design d. If “memory remapping” is enabled in your BIOS (sometimes is necessary to update it for this option to be available) e. If you have memory assigned to your graphic card in your BIOS

Hello again everyone! David here to discuss a scenario that is becoming more and more popular for administrators of Distributed File System Namespaces (DFSN): consolidation of one or more standalone namespaces that are referenced by a domain-based namespace ...read more